Tel Dan
by Order of Arcadia
Summary: "Beautiful. Broken. Hurt, and torn apart, and yet restored." Flash-fic. Bucky and Steve take a trip to Israel, and Steve does some contemplating. No slash, post-Aou-ish, the Remembered AU. Christian themes.


**Tel Dan**

One of the greatest blessings of the new century was travel.

Steve Rogers had never seen much of the world before he woke up after the ice. Sure, he and the Commandos traveled all over Europe for their missions, but a line of bomb-shelled trenches and barbed wire in the French countryside didn't look much different from one in Italy or Germany. Maybe if you were lucky, there was an unsullied forest or mountain range in the distance, enough to give weary eyes respite from the ugliness and drudgery. But mud and munitions, dirt and death—those were the same no matter where you went.

Airplanes had been present in the war, of course, but not for kicks and joyrides. They were weapons, and cutting-edge ones, a real and present danger. Steve hadn't been forced to ground one in the ocean for nothing. But nowadays, they were used for transportation, at all hours of the day and night—it was almost hilarious, to see these contraptions that had been born as weapons of war now ten or fifteen times bigger than they had been at first, and called such quaint and tame names as "airbus". A bus in the sky.

Planes could take you in a matter of hours where it would have cost you days on a boat or train to reach before. Of course ticket prices were no small thing, but if you caught them on the off-season or flew at night, the price was negligible; more so if you had a small cash fund saved up for that very reason.

So they took advantage of it, in the quiet furloughs between Avengers missions, to pack a bag and hop on a plane somewhere they'd never seen before. 'They', of course, meant him and Bucky. The others might travel on their own time, or spend their money elsewhere, but this was a choice just for the two of them, and a quiet excursion to get away from the pressures of work.

They didn't plan more than a few weeks in advance; as soon as the quiet set in, they took the opportunity, knowing it could be snatched away from them at any moment.

This time, they'd planned to go to the Holy Land—Israel. Steve had made sure to pack a sketchbook.

The country was a contentious one; apparently, not much had changed since ancient times. Some war-torn sectors were closed to visitors, as he and Bucky discovered too late, and they'd find themselves wandering the local villages for something to eat and making their own small discoveries.

The wilderness of Judea was harsh. Barren. Sand whirled on the floor of dry valleys flanked by steep, clay-colored cliffs of stone. Where there was vegetation, it was tufts of brush or weeds; Steve's sketchbook slowly filled with images of a landscape full of rocks, peppered with stubborn bushes, and pocked with caves.

Even the Jordan River, where John baptized the Christ—though it was flanked on the banks by some thick overgrowth, the river ran brown with mud. Many of the sites they visited were like that—rocks, dust, mud. There was the ruins of a synagogue near Capurnum, where the Christ himself may have preached; the vast, quiet Galilee, stirred up into a raging squall by a storm that blew in suddenly that night; the Weeping Wall in Jerusalem, where Jewish men still prayed and slipped pieces of paper between the stones of the ruined temple wall. Steve himself left a little folded note, and never told anyone what it said.

The cities were modern, of course, if quiet and still painted white to deflect the scorching sunlight. Bethlehem was still a tiny place, but the motel had wifi and electric plugs in the room. He and Bucky shook sand out of their shoes at the end of the day; they often did, wherever it was they stayed, in their trek across the country.

But Tel Dan was different.

Tel Dan was green.

It sat on the northeast end of the country, a hotly contested area between Israel, Lebanon, and Syria. It was really only in the last fifty years that the world at large had begun to wage wars over oil; but for almost all of history, wars had been waged over water, and here, it became apparent why.

Tel Dan was green. Tel Dan was lush. Tel Dan had water—clear, cool, beautiful fresh water from springs that rushed through the underground limestone and burst out of the rocks themselves. It was safe to drink, and safe to fill water bottles. They took a hike through the cool shadows of the forest and stopped to admire a stream gushing in white foam down the rapids between the trees.

Next to the desert, and the cliffs, and the barren caves in Steve's sketchbook, the greenery of Tel Dan looked like the Garden of Eden itself.

This place had once been a war-zone. Not that you could tell; decades of rest and quiet had allowed the water and the fertile soil to do its work, and the land that was once scarred by war was now green with grass and trees.

There was a bunker hidden in the hills, and spiraled barbed wire if you knew where to look; and Bucky found an old Syrian tank, rusting in a grassy field in the countryside, in the shadow of a tall green tree.

Steve knew things like this don't happen by accident. Restoration takes time; scars don't heal overnight. But here, it was clear that things that had once been broken could be beautiful again—here, it was clear that that which was hurt could be healed.

He sat at a distance in the shadow of the forest, and quickly captured the scene with jotted lines and a few sparse colors—the blue of the sky, the green of the trees and grass, the silver of the clouds and his friend's hand in his pocket, and the brown of the rusting tank and Bucky's hair as it was buffeted softly in the wind.

Beautiful. Broken. Hurt, and torn apart, and yet restored.

He could use those words to describe more than just Tel Dan.

Steve could hear the approaching footsteps crunching in the grass before he finished his work—and when he looked up, there was Bucky, leaning over him and blocking the sun.

"Hey."

"Hey."

Bucky crouched down and sat on the grass beside him, looking over his shoulder at the sketchbook. Steve's pencil continued to scratch on the paper.

They sat there in companionable silence for a little while. The tank slumbered on in the field, far away.

"What'cha thinking?" Steve asked softly, hardly audible over the sound of the wind in the leaves.

Bucky took a deep breath and leaned back on his hands. "That it's incredible all this is alive again."

"Yeah." Steve couldn't help the smile growing on his face. He was just now adding the final deep blue to Bucky's sleeve.

"What about you?"

Steve's hand slowed. He felt almost bashful. "Honest?" he asked, letting the sketchbook drop into his lap.

"Yeah."

Steve looked up, met his best friend's ocean-blue eyes, and allowed himself a tight little smile. "That it's incredible _you're_ alive again."

Bucky's jaw dropped just a moment, but then his lips curled up into a smile, and he gave a little huff of a laugh.

They sat there for a moment longer, reluctant to move on, and Bucky put his head on Steve's shoulder.

They took the sketch home, but left the scene just as they found it, with a rusting tank alone in a field.

**The End**

* * *

**A/N: I've never been to Israel, but I've seen pictures and footage of some sites. When my pastor talked about his trip this morning and made an allusion to "Tel Dan people", I couldn't resist. Bucky is a Tel Dan person.**

**Reviews are green.**


End file.
